Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.

Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.

Why do so many frown so sternly at the idea of having fun? Perhaps out of fear that it connotes you aren't serious. But best as we can tell, there is no correlation between appearing to be serious and actually being good at what you do. In fact an argument can be made that the opposite is true.

For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they're hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.

But being confident you are right is not the same as being right.

Experts depend on the fact that you don't have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn't know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn't dare challenge them.

The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.

Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.

Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks.

As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Colleges and universities, meanwhile, have no such qualms about torturing their applicants. Think about how much work a high-school student must do to even be considered for a spot at a decent college. The difference in college and job applications is especially striking when you consider that a job applicant will be getting paid upon acceptance while a college applicant will be paying for the privilege to attend.

Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't. Such are the vagaries of life.

The best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.

But wouldn't it be nice if we all smuggled a few childlike instincts across the border into adulthood? We'd spend more time saying what we mean and asking questions we care about;

The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs—even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback.

Have fun, think small, don't fear the obvious.

Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

The takeaway here is simple but powerful: just because you're great at something doesn't mean you're good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or "the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent—all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.

It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.